At the end he had started making excuses why he could not go but she, while sympathising as he cried when she put his clothes on, had insisted he must go which he had done without a fuss, much to his mother’s surprise. In an Author’s Note she adds that, when Dibs’s IQ was measured shortly after the sessions had been completed, it had been found to be 168 and that all the words in the book are those of Dibs and his mother. She concludes, “A mother who is respected and accepted with dignity can also be sincerely expressive when she knows that she will not be criticized or blamed” (p. 186). Discussion He had started as before walking round, touching and naming objects. She had asked whether he would like to take his hat and coat off and he had agreed but had done nothing about it. Eventually he had asked for help to take things off but had dropped them on the floor, so she had put them on a hook. In Chapter 24 she recounts how, two and half years later, she had heard Dibs talking to a friend outside her flat and learned that Dibs had moved into a house down the road. She had later met him in the street; he had told exactly how long it had been since their last session because he had framed the date of the last visit.

Dibs’s mother had influenced the school board to accept him but had refused the offer of professional help; his father was a well-known scientist and his younger sister a ‘spoiled brat.’ With other parents complaining after Dibs had scratched another child, his mother had been told that the school was thinking of excluding him and there had been a case conference to which Miss A (as Dibs called her) had been invited. The staff were obviously captivated by Dibs and had agreed to her suggestion of play therapy. The focus of this story of Dibs has to do with Axline’s application of a very specific form of psychotherapy known as play therapy. This has proven over the decades since publication of the book to be an especially effective form of therapy for getting at the root of behavioral problems in children. But what is especially significant to keep in mind is that Axline has absolutely no way of knowing whether her choice of therapy will have impact on Dibs because, although she has theories, she does not know what his problem is. Others have voiced opinions on that topic, but nobody knows for sure. And no matter how effective any particular therapy maybe in treating a condition, it inevitably winds up being useless in treating the wrong condition. Just as one wouldn’t take prescription medication for a heart problem to treat depression, using play therapy to treat mental retardation is probably only going to produce a result purely by happy coincidence.Resuming telling off the mother doll, he had recounted how she used to cry before speaking tenderly to the mother doll, putting the family of dolls together and beginning a prayer which he had stopped abruptly with the words, “These are not church people”. But she was now anxious that he was “too unusual” and wondered if he was schizophrenic; they had sent his sister away to school so that they could concentrate on him. She had admitted that she had taken things out on Dibs because of the strained relationship with her husband, with both of them fighting to avoid admitting guilt for Dibs’s condition. But now both parents’ feelings had changed. He had told her, to her surprise, that she had said, “This is all yours, Dibs. Have fun. Nobody is going to hurt you in here”, and he had gradually come to believe her. He had said that he had found his enemies and fought them; he had also learned how big God was and, in response to a question, she had revealed that she had heard his earlier conversation which had made him realise that they were now neighbours. She had met his parents a few days later when his mother had asked him why he called her Miss A. “A special name for a special friend”, he had replied. Ultimately, the successful treatment of Dibs is accomplished not with because of play therapy itself, but because Dr. Axline had was able to imagine that whatever condition Dibs suffered from was one that could be effective treated with play therapy. In this Introduction, Leonard Carmichael compares the story of Dibs to “a first-class detective story.” On the other hand, story of the book itself is comparable to one those movies about the cop who is the one capable of catching the bad guy he doesn’t play the rules. Which is simply a phrase to describe having the imagination to think in a way that other can’t or won’t. Update this section!

The story of Dibs also reinforces the evidence that children have the capacity to self-heal if they are provided with an environment in which that self-healing can take place (Clarke and Clarke, 1976). As Neill (1962) and Lyward found, children don’t need individual therapy; at no time does Virginia Axline try to discuss or explain or interpret his behaviour to Dibs. She simply gives him an environment in which he can explore his own feelings and come to his own conclusions about them, whatever they are. In Chapter 10 she recounts how he had talked, among other things, about seeing similar toys in a shop and going to collect his father’s shoes from the mender’s while spending most of the time playing in the sandbox. At playtime, he had initially declined to go out but had done so when Miss A did; he had rested along with the other children after playtime and, when the children had joined in group activities, Miss A had invited him to the playroom. He had gone with her, holding her hand tightly.Neill, A S (1962) Summerhill: a radical approach to education London: Victor Gollancz Originally published 1960 Summerhill: a radical approach to child rearing New York: Hart See also Children Webmag July 2009 In Chapter 16 she recounts how Dibs had admitted to winding up his father, while threatening the father doll with a toy gun which he then hid in the basement of the doll’s house. He had then gone on to talk about the children at school before engaging in some water play, making a glass harmonica, and then mixing up all the paint jars. He had then gone to the office where he had pasted in some bookplates and asked for reassurance about his relationship with her. On his departure he had run to his mother and said, “Oh mother, I love you”. In Chapter 1, Virginia Axline describes her first sight of Dibs in a corner, crouched, head down, arms across his chest, ignoring the fact that it was home time and resisting his teacher’s attempts to get him to go home. If Dibs had not stopped resisting by the time his mother arrived, the chauffeur would be sent in to collect him. In Chapter 18 she recounts how she had received a call from one of the teachers who had described a gradual change in Dibs’s behaviour at school and so she had arranged to meet two of the teachers for lunch. But, when they had showed her the very elementary pictures and writing he was producing, she had initially been baffled but hadn’t told them that he could do much better because it might have discouraged them. There can be little argument that the story of Dibs: In Search of Self is about Dibs and his quest to establish a sense of self-identity. In this sense of the narrative, it is the tale of a little boy named Dibs and processes of a certain school of behavioral therapy. On the other hand, an argument can be made while the story is about Dibs, the book is about its author and the power of imagination to alter the course of a person’s narrative. Without the intervention of Dr. Axline, the story of Dibs would have played out quite differently, but that is probably true whether Axline’s approach was that as applied in the book or whether it had been any other approach she might have chosen.

In Chapter 23 she recounts how, after the summer holidays, his mother had telephoned to book another session. He had talked to the secretaries first before going to the office and, finding that she had moved the other cards into another box leaving just the cards he had created in the box, he had written another card saying, “Goodbye”. Then he had gone into the playroom where he had turned on the water, poured yellow paint on floor, decided that she was “the lady of the wonderful playroom”, smashed the baby’s bottle in pieces, played with various things, put the doll family in the doll’s house living room, asked about other children visiting the playroom and, looking out of the window, had asked to go and see the church across the road. Robertson, J. and Robertson, J (1971) Young children in brief separation: a fresh look Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 26, 264-315 See also Children Webmag October 2009 It is difficult in a summary such as this to convey the depth and power of the descriptions of Dibs’s encounters with Miss A, one reason why it has been a regular on so many students’ book-lists for nearly half a century, but it is important not to be carried away by the work with Dibs. The key to her success, as she points out, was as much her uncritical, accepting and respectful relationship with his mother. Like Homer Lane (Bazeley, 1928) and George Lyward (Burn, 1956), she did not believe that, because a parent appeared to have ‘failed’ with their child, that was any reason to exclude them from what was happening to their child. Like Lyward she imposed the boundaries that she thought were necessary for her work and she took the same risk that Lyward did – that they would reject those boundaries and therefore the work with their child.Residential care can take advantage of this possibility if the child goes home regularly, for example at weekends or on the way home from school (Berridge, 1985). It also needs to be recognised that sometimes there never will be an opportunity for the child to return to live with their parents permanently but the improvement in child-parent relationships is likely to have a significant effect on wider family relationships, including sibling relationships, which are likely to be a source of support in the future. He had then asked to go to the office where he had looked up ‘yeast’ in the dictionary, written a Morse code message which he had also written on another card in the card file, had told her what other presents he had received and had thanked her for her birthday card. He had then made an impossible demand of the mother doll, shouting at and threatening it before breaking off to play tenderly with the sister doll and talking about school and the things he had made at school for the members of the family. In Chapter 9 she recounts how he had arrived fifteen minutes early at his mother’s request, had taken his outdoor clothes off, hung them up, started painting and then tapped the two-way mirror and said that he knew that people had been there before but that they weren’t that day. He had then played in the sandbox, breaking to look at her notes and telling her to spell out the names of the colours and not abbreviate them. He had later sung a song full of hateful words and tried to fix the doll’s house. He had pretended it wasn’t time to go and had hoped that the doctor would hurt his sister when he did the jabs, the reason for the earlier appointment. He had repeated the question about why some people believe and some don’t and she had said that everyone made up their own minds when they were older but that it was confusing for him now.